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and the sanctity of life.
This same principle, that 
Genesis 1 is a polemic, part of an 
argument with a background, is 
essential to understanding the 
idea that God created humanity 
“in His image, after His like-
ness.
” This language would not 
have been unfamiliar to the first 
readers of the Torah. It was one 
they knew well.
It was commonplace in the 
first civilizations, Mesopotamia 
and ancient Egypt. Certain 
people were said to be in the 
image of God. They were the 
kings of the Mesopotamian 
city states and the pharaohs 
of Egypt. Nothing could have 
been more radical than to say 
that not just kings and rulers 
are God’s image. We all are. 
Even today the idea is daring: 
how much more so in an age 
of absolute rulers with absolute 
power.
Understood thus, Genesis 1: 
26-27 is not so much a meta-
physical statement about the 
nature of the human person as 
it is a political protest against the 
very basis of hierarchical, class- 
or caste-based societies, whether 
in ancient or modern times. 
That is what makes it the most 
incendiary idea in the Torah. In 
some fundamental sense, we are 
all equal in dignity and ultimate 
worth, for we are all in God’s 
image regardless of color, cul-
ture or creed.

KINGDOM OF PRIESTS
A similar idea appears later in 
the Torah, in relation to the 
Jewish people, when God invit-
ed them to become a kingdom 
of priests and a holy nation. All 
nations in the ancient world 
had priests, but none was “a 
kingdom of priests.
” All reli-
gions have holy individuals, but 
none claimed to be a nation 
every one of whose members 
was holy. This, too, took time to 
materialize.
During the entire biblical era, 
there were hierarchies. There 
were priests and high priests, a 
holy elite. But after the destruc-
tion of the Second Temple, 
every prayer became a sacrifice, 
every leader of prayer a priest, 

and every synagogue a fragment 
of the Temple. A profound egal-
itarianism is at work just below 
the surface of the Torah, and the 
rabbis knew it and lived it.
A second idea is contained 
in the phrase, “and let him have 
dominion over the fish in the 
sea and the birds in the sky.
” 
Note that there is no suggestion 
that anyone has the right to 
have dominion over any other 
human being. 
In Paradise Lost, Milton, like 
the Midrash, states that this was 
the sin of Nimrod, the first great 
ruler of Assyria and by impli-
cation the builder of the Tower 
of Babel (see Genesis 10: 8-11). 
Milton writes that when Adam 
was told that Nimrod would 
“arrogate dominion unde-
served,
” he was horrified:

O execrable son so to aspire
Above his Brethren, to him-
self assuming
Authority usurped, from God 
not given:
He gave us only over beast, 
fish, fowl
Dominion absolute; that right 
we hold
By his donation; but man 
over men
He made not lord; such title 
to himself
Reserving, human left from 
human free. 
(Paradise Lost, Book XII: 
64-71)

To question the right of 
humans to rule over other 
humans, without their consent, 
was at that time utterly unthink-
able. All advanced societies 
were like this. How could they 
be otherwise? Was this not the 
very structure of the universe? 
Did the sun not rule the day? 
Did the moon not rule the 
night? Was there not in heaven 

itself a hierarchy of the gods? 
Already implicit here is the deep 
ambivalence the Torah would 
ultimately show toward the very 
institution of kingship, the rule 
of “man over men.
”
The third implication lies in 
the sheer paradox of God say-
ing, “Let us make man in our 
image, after our likeness.
” We 
sometimes forget, when reading 
these words, that in Judaism 
God has no image or likeness. 
To make an image of God is 
to transgress the second of the 
Ten Commandments and to be 
guilty of idolatry. Moses empha-
sized that at the revelation at 
Sinai, “You saw no likeness, you 
only heard the sound of words.
”
God has no image because 
He is not physical. He tran-
scends the physical universe 

because He created it. Therefore, 
He is free, unconstrained by the 
laws of matter. That is what God 
means when He tells Moses 
that His name is “I will be what 
I will be,
” and later when, after 
the sin of the golden calf, He 
tells him, “I will have mercy on 
who I will have mercy.
” God 
is free, and by making us in 
His image, He gave us also the 
power to be free.

MISUSING FREEDOM
This, as the Torah makes clear, 
was God’s most fateful gift. 
Given freedom, humans mis-
use it. Adam and Eve disobey 
God’s command. Cain murders 
Abel. By the end of the parshah, 
we find ourselves in the world 
before the Flood, filled with 
violence to the point where God 
regretted that He had ever creat-
ed humanity.
This is the central drama 
of Tanach and of Judaism as a 
whole. Will we use our freedom 
to respect order or misuse it to 

create chaos? Will we honor or 
dishonor the image of God that 
lives within the human heart 
and mind?
These are not ancient ques-
tions only. They are as alive 
today as ever they were in the 
past. The question raised by 
serious thinkers, ever since 
Nietzsche argued in favor of 
abandoning both God and the 
Judeo-Christian ethic, is wheth-
er justice, human rights and the 
unconditional dignity of the 
human person are capable of 
surviving on secular grounds 
alone? Nietzsche himself 
thought not.
In 2008, Yale philosopher 
Nicholas Woltersdorff published 
a magisterial work arguing that 
our Western concept of justice 
rests on the belief that “all of 
us have great and equal worth: 
the worth of being made in 
the image of God and of being 
loved redemptively by God.
” 
There is, he insists, no secular 
rationale on which a similar 
framework of justice can be 
built. That is surely what John 
F. Kennedy meant in his inau-
gural when he spoke of the 
“revolutionary beliefs for which 
our forebears fought,
” that “the 
rights of man come not from 
the generosity of the state, but 
from the hand of God.
”
Momentous ideas made the 
West what it is: human rights, 
the abolition of slavery, the 
equal worth of all and justice 
based on the principle that right 
is sovereign over might. All ulti-
mately derived from the state-
ment in the first chapter of the 
Torah that we are made in God’s 
image and likeness.
No other text has had a great-
er influence on moral thought, 
nor has any other civilization 
ever held a higher vision of 
what we are called on to be. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 

served as the chief rabbi of the 

United Hebrew Congregations of 

the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His 

teachings have been made available 

to all. This essay was first published 

in October 2014.

GOD IS FREE, AND BY MAKING US 
IN HIS IMAGE, HE GAVE US ALSO 
THE POWER TO BE FREE.

